In today's digital society organizations depend on having ready access to their data. Data, however, can be lost in a variety of ways such as through accidental deletion, data corruption, disasters and catastrophes (e.g., fires or flooding), media failures (e.g., disk crash), computer viruses, and so forth. Thus, it is important to backup data in the event that the data needs to be restored. An organization may have an immense amount of data that is critical to the organization's operation. Backing up data and subsequently recovering backed up data, however, can involve large amounts of computing resources such as network bandwidth, processing cycles, and storage due to the complexity and amount of data to be backed up and restored when needed.
Virtual machines have emerged as one of the fundamental technologies that companies use in their data centers and elsewhere to manage data and provide services. A host hardware platform uses virtualization software to create and host any number of virtual machines. A virtual machine is a software abstraction of a real computer system. A host hardware platform may host dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of virtual machines.
There is an ever increasing demand for backup and recovery techniques that improve the backup and recovery performance of virtual machines. A typical computing environment hosting a virtual machine may include software applications from any number of different vendors. For example, the vendor providing the virtualization platform may be different from the vendor providing the backup application. Information needed by the backup application to efficiently backup and restore virtual machines hosted by the virtualization platform may not be readily available. For example, in some cases, the virtualization platform will fail to provide access to configuration information associated with a virtual machine that the backup application may need to efficiently backup and restore the virtual machine.
Therefore, there is a need for improved backup and recovery techniques, and especially a technique that enables a backup application and system to interact with a virtualization platform to efficiently backup and recover a virtual machine.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Restorer, and Data Domain Boost are trademarks of EMC Corporation.